Them's fighting words!!

Won’t someone think of the racists?

Apparently, we must. Over with our friends in the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate scene, Felix Hasson, who plays under the name “T_Pot”, recently reached an agreement regarding a lawsuit that was filed on his behalf by the National Jewish Advocacy Center, who argued that the player was banned from some tournaments and Discord servers “on the basis of his Jewish racial, religious, and national origin identity.” Well I don’t much care for that, I’ll tell you. Having written prior about my disgust towards winking, ironic, thinly disguised anti-semite posting, this is a matter I find to be a real nuisance. If someone is getting treated differently just because they are Jewish, that should be called out immediately.

Now let’s take a look at the legal filing. What’d they throw the keys away on the kid for?

…Wow.

I don’t exactly think you need to be a geopolitical expert to call balls and strikes on some racist crap. If even your most ardent legal defense is “Palestinian Arabs are known terrorist bombing enjoyers”, I feel like this does not bode well for an alternative read! Don’t think I didn’t miss that little “Palestine” in inverted commas there either – what’s that about? Curiouser and curiouser, I say!

There are some other tweets there, but really I think this is the kicker. Still, should probably lean towards grace with poor-taste jokes, especially with young kids like this plaintiff. I’m sure given that a more heightened conflict kicked in after the vicious attack on October 7th, 2023, there was probably a somber moment of reflection on –

Welp, so much for that.

Now one could ask the question, charitably, that these tweets are mean and unkind, but are they necessarily indicative of any kind of extreme thought? There is a conflation at times, usually made in bad faith, that simply being of Jewish descent and having some semblance of a feeling toward Israel means you belong in the same camp as the Zionist, or worse the Kahanist, who believes that a Jewish State should enforce a Jewish ethnic majority with extreme prejudice. Again, I would exercise caution, as labeling someone that of your own accord, not theirs, can lead to –

Man, I really ought to keep reading before I comment.

So you’ve got someone making racist cracks about Palestinians, then mocking someone who suffered extreme loss in the brutal ethnic cleansing campaign following October 7th, all while embracing that they are a believer of this volatile political ideology, not the caricature that is sometimes used as a bad faith smear. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck…

Apparently a major contention for the antisemitic angle comes from an unrelated party referring to the plaintiff as a “racist zionist weasel” in their callout tweet to get tournament organizers to ban him. Which, again, rude language, but:

a) The kid did make a racist remark intended as a joke

b) self ID’s as a proud Zionist

If anything the “weasel” part is what gets the most ire in the complaint. Apparently, the invocation of any animal in relates to making fun of a Jewish person is, in fact, an antisemitic slur. Or, I’m sorry, a “Nazi talking point”.

Good to know!

You can quibble with the language of the rando who made the initial callout tweet all you like, but it sounds like this is a disagreement over hate speech and political opinions. You can say that’s lame or whatever, but these are social settings – inflammatory hate speech and divisive political ideologies can and do cause social rifts even while being completely protected legally speaking. “Zionism”, by its very definition, was a ethnonationalist political movement started in the 19th century with a concrete ethos, thought leaders, and goal: a creation of a nation state as a Jewish homeland. Sure sounds like a political action to me!

But what if it wasn’t?

Boom! Checkmate, anti-zionists. It turns out Zionism is now above “mere politics”, and is as integral to being Jewish as the lineage itself. Again, very, very strange assertion coming from these lawyers. We’ll check back in with them later, but you’re on notice, pal!

So I’m finding these claims of antisemitism a little spurious on their face, but what other evidence do they have? It seems like the goal here is to show a double standard – attendees of these tournaments have been caught in 8K with Dolby Digital Surround Sound being antisemites and faced no ban, while our poor plaintiff caught one for being a patriot. Troubling, if true. Let’s look at some examples:

…Right. Obvious joke about white people is now racism. I thought comedy was legal again? Again, seems to me that if you point out a political candidate criticizing the political actions of the state of Israel, that is now antisemitism. Not very sound stuff, I must say. What else is there?

Aside from, again, a critique of a political action being taken, I’m fascinated by “Holocaust Inversion”. Is the idea that there can be no comparison to the objectively true ethnic cleansing and slaughter that took place then, a crime so extreme we invented a new word, “Genocide” for it? Is it saying that to ever accuse a Jewish state of the crime of -I guess it’s a sensitive issue so I won’t say it, but it rhymes with “barbicide” – is tantamount to racism? A novel legal theory, surely, that you can’t have the opinion a certain ethnicity is capable of a crime. Anything left?

Oh c’mon now! As one of those hwhites mentioned, I frequently misinterpret Jesus, particularly when he says “Love thy neighbor”, so I find no fault here.

It goes on and on like this. The “double standard” is that the country of Israel is being slandered, and this alone counts for antisemitism. None of their examples seem to point to a person having a particular racial animus for any one Jewish person, but just Israel and/or the political ideology of Zionism. Also laughably bad-faith attempts at sniping anti-white racism? Are we serious?

Apparently, any defense Israel takes is, actually, a core component of race and national origin and also above politics and, therefore critique.

A “Jewish warrior class”? Is that like Magneto and Ben Grimm? Can you even criticize the Israeli Defense Force with this kind of logic? It sure seems odd to tie your sense of self, race, and religion to raping male prisoners, wanton murder of children, and mass starvation of civilians, but you do you, I guess.

In all this, the most egregious thing I can find is that Luminosity, who runs the Make Big Moves tournament in NYC, allegedly not only never contacted the player privately regarding the ban, but didn’t refund his pre-reg fee. First of all, give the kid his money back, what are we doing? Secondly, talk your shit! If you have a zero tolerance policy towards hate speech, I see no reason why that can’t be communicated directly. It’s a big problem when people want to enforce things and use it as a boundary, but also have complete and total lack of integrity when it comes to actually communicating and enforcing it.

But really, that’s about all I can critique. I’ve been critical of how certain bans have been done – lack of due diligence, lack of communication, lack of timeframe, really any sort of base-level professionalism – but this is an issue of logistics. At no point do I believe any tournament can’t ban people, especially if they have a ToS or CoC that is explicitly broken. Sometimes the accusations and claims can be a little spurious, exaggerated, and unsupported, but by all accounts that was not the case here.

Lastly, I do think there is merit to saying that simply looking at a legal filing should not reflect on the plaintiff directly. These kind of documents are, by nature, bombastic and zealous, with a lot of the claims made somewhat in bad faith as a means of litigating them down in arbitration or in court. I do think what Hasson said was definitely racist, but the arguments made in the filing, while reinforcing that racism, are also made in his defense legally, not necessarily morally. I take issue with the odd interpretation of religious civil rights, but if that’s a legal argument, it’s not entirely indicative of any sort of feelings outside the context of a lawsuit.

Wait, what’s this? Hasson’s attorney posts publicly on Twitter his logic for why they made these claims?

Never mind, he’s just racist. Again, a legal advocate is not the same as his client, and I can’t speak to whether Hasson agrees with any of this. Having said that, this is gutter racism; if there was any other context where someone maintained that a ethnic minority group is prone to “terrorism” due to a “defective culture”, they would not be allowed to participate in polite society.

What kind of advocacy group is having people on tap that are this level of racist?

I’m glad you asked!

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The National Jewish Advocacy Center (NJAC) is a nonprofit that specifically looks to take on cases that involve what they believe is antisemitism. It’s entirely common for these kind of groups to emerge, especially since it can be expensive to assert your rights even if you’re being discriminated against. But you may ask – why would a group that is talking about taking on Harvard and other big organizations running to the defense of a Glup Shitto who was banned from a couple of tournaments and Discords?

I’ve been noting over the course of this blog the odd arguments at play: indeed, the critique of the political actions of a country are now tied to racial animus and stereotypes. It’s almost like there is a concentrated movement, dare I say politically motivated, that is trying to make it so that it is antisemitic – therefore illegal – to engage in this kind of criticism of Israel, its leadership, and its active ethnic cleansing campaign.

Turns out that is exactly the case. If you Google this case, you will only see two news outlets that are covering it:

You’ve got The Times of Israel and the Jerusalem Post. As expected, these are both Israeli news outlets based in Jerusalem that cover topics with a focus on Israel in particular. Makes sense, considering the lawsuit had some serious claims of antisemitism. But if you look at the coverage itself, a troubling pattern starts to emerge.

From The Times:

“Hoping to set a legal precedent”. So the political action is just apparent, no one appears to be hiding it. By broadening the range of what is considered antisemitism, the idea is that it will no longer be legally tolerable to criticize Israel Zionist extremism, one that seeks to ethnically cleanse any other political actors in the region, chiefly the Palestinians, from their valid claims to disputed territory. Here’s Matt Mainen, the lawyer filing the suit and seething racist from earlier:

And if it wasn’t any more clear, here’s directly from the NJAC website newsletter:

So a major nonprofit organization with the explicit goal of criminalizing speech that criticizes the political actions of the state of Israel specifically sought out a case that they intended to use as a legal battering ram to further their cause. In the course of doing so, they intended to stifle the speech and rights of American tournament organizers, humiliating and legally strongarming them into settling the suit and dropping these statements, which sound like they were typed at gunpoint:

It sickens me to know that an organization with extreme political views has taken to bullying people in these communities and coercing them into settling lawsuits that they couldn’t hope to fight back against. And by extreme views, I don’t mean “thinks Israel has a right to exist,” I mean “you should be in prison/defunded for saying mean things about my country” and “Palestinians don’t deserve rights or aid“.

As they laughably maintain that their advocacy isn’t explicitly political, I’ll hip you to a few moves that kind of give away the game. Going back to the legal filing for Hasson’s suit, you can see a few rhetorical tricks they use to completely delegitimize a ongoing political conflict.

Remember earlier how I noted “Palestine” in inverted commas?

Some of the more extreme Israeli Zionists believe that the entire concept of “Palestinian” is illegitimate because there never was such a recognizable area or state called “Palestine”, you see. It’s meant to diminish legal claims to discrimination and theft, by implying that they are basically a fake nationality. Prima facie racism, and a means to commit gen – ahem, “barbicide” against an alleged savage race of nomad Arabs without any sort of accountability or criticism.

A similar rhetorical trick is used later, when referring to one of Hasson’s other tweets that were criticized:

The West Bank is territory that was claimed from the neighboring country of Jordan in the Six-Day War in 1967, and has been militarily occupied ever since. Calling it “Judea and Samaria” is the more extreme Israeli Zionists’ way of claiming it as their own territory – in a later sentence it is even described as the “backwoods of Israel”. By claiming it is Israeli land by right, religious settlers – modern day Ku Klux Klansmen – occupy this area and with extreme violence force out Arab inhabitants and take their property. The Israeli government, intending to make a politically sticky issue permanent in their favor, aids and abets these violent settlers at any cost, even when they kill American citizens.

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I think the most pathetic thing is the subgroup of people who hem and haw about bans and how unjust they are and that free speech is free speech, blah blah blah. When this news came out, some of them were loudly seal-clapping like braindead slobs, happy that a brave soul had the courage (and extremist political NGO) to take on this cabal of tournament organizers. No care for the actual chilling effects on speech, the stomping all over of the rights of social groups to exclude racist speech from their communities, or that a group with explicit political motivations made a pet issue of theirs. You always hear “leave politics out of it”, and yet when someone brings in politics to advocate for a ideology that is at best an ethnonationalist project, crickets. Frauds, charlatans, cocksuckers all of them, they think you are the dumbest people on the planet.

Tournament organizers do a thankless job – they are providing a service that is difficult to do with great resources, and try to do it with little-to-none in order to please everyone. A lot of times it’s done out of their own pocket, on their own time, as a hobby. These aren’t huge corporations – conflating, say, Evo being owned by Sony with all tournaments writ large is incredibly ignorant. These are regular people with jobs and bills, they aren’t exactly in the habit of having to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars because an extremist political advocacy group decided to pick on them for not supporting their extremist views explicitly.

To humiliate these people, to make them grovel as you advance your political agenda that is solely intent on chilling speech and providing cover for a “barbicide”, that anyone with eyes and ears can see is happening, is disgusting. Think what you will about petty drama being litigated in public, but this is a powerful country engaged in terrible things, whose advocates are now willing to bring hell around your ears if you critique it. That is in no way making any event safer for any participant, and I do not want a world where organizers and random Discord users should have to worry that they’ll be deposed for speaking what they believe to be true.